The Fugitives
Page 19
“Nap time?” she asked.
“I could take a snooze.”
“Better put yourself away first.” She reached into the console and pulled out a pack of Kleenex, then wiped her hand, her wrist, the console itself, and the display on the stereo. “Is this sort of thing the reason your marriage broke up?” Why not raise the subject? Her bold presumption seemed to make him come fully alert.
“My marriage broke up,” he said with some spirit, “because I was fucking bored to death. My marriage broke up because it was a pain, literally. For ten years I had pain in my neck, pain in my upper back, pain in my lower back, pain in my hip. Ten years, mysterious pain, doctors, genuine Park Avenue specialists, shaking their heads, take more ibuprofen is what they said. I moved out and it just went away.”
“We should get going,” she said. “I’m surprised we haven’t passed out from carbon monoxide poisoning.”
“Wouldn’t you notice?”
“It’s colorless. And odorless. And it doesn’t irritate the lungs or nasal passages.”
“There must be symptoms.”
“If you got a headache right now, what would you attribute it to?”
“Your big mouth.”
Well, she had to laugh at that one. Then she sat for a moment, staring ahead through the windshield. She felt momentarily content. The car was warm, from the heat streaming through the vents and from the sunlight streaming through the windows.
“That was fun,” she announced.
A robin landed on the hood of the car and strutted across it. She watched him carefully. He turned, seemed to see her, then flew away.
“They don’t usually overwinter here,” she said. Mulligan seemed to shrug in response. “It’s a robin,” she informed him, faintly annoyed. Dutifully, he looked at the spot on the hood where the bird had landed. She put the car in gear. They drove in silence from the dunes back to Cherry City. She steered onto Division, passing the Dairy Lodge, shuttered for the winter, the Lions Club, the Lutheran church, the insane asylum where Andrew Meisler’s curated, value-added, irresistible conversation apparently would soon be raging. The town began to cohere into its own All-American et cetera: houses and service stations, dilapidated storefronts and shiny chains, bars and churches, good real estate and bad. At his direction, she steered onto Twelfth Street, drove through the next intersection, and came to a stop before a gray bungalow. A pickup was parked in the driveway. She noticed that he hadn’t shoveled the sidewalk or the path to the door.
“Do you want to come in?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I should be doing some work, I think.”
“How about dinner?”
“I really can’t.”
He grinned and theatrically threw up his hands. “Takeout again.”
She couldn’t tell if he was miffed or not. She looked past him at the house. A raw four-by-four substituted for one of the posts holding up the roof of the veranda, but otherwise it was a trim little house. She wondered what it was like inside. It was too dark to see through the windows.
“Well, eat something,” she advised. “We skipped lunch, remember?”
He grinned again—remembering—and got out of the car. “Are you here for a few days?”
“Not really.”
“But you’ll be back.”
“I’ll be back.”
“Can I get in touch with you?”
She looked in her wallet and pulled out Meisler’s card and wrote her e-mail address on the back. He studied the card curiously for a moment, both sides, and then stuffed it in his pocket. She waved and drove away, and in the rearview mirror she could see him standing at the edge of the snow-covered lawn, until he was out of sight and, presumably, she was too.
22
KAT let Grandview carry her out of town and then headed south. She was on her way to Nebising, outmaneuvered by Becky, who claimed not to have received the photographs, said she didn’t have a phone that could receive them, said the signal was bad, said the Internet was out, said she had to come, could she please come. She drove into the thick of the blasted state. She was angry. This was exactly the showdown Becky’s appeal had been designed to lead her toward. She should have known and she was angry. At Leatonville she turned into the reservation and found her way to her own little parcel, a dozen or so houses with TV light flickering in the windows. She passed her old place. A scuffed and dusty Taurus was in the drive.
She parked behind a large pickup truck and climbed the steps to Becky’s house. On the porch rail there was a white mug with a broken handle. It was stuffed with cigarette butts and had the phrase “Fill This, Intern” printed on it. Kat stood looking at the welcome mat, which read “OH SHIT NOT YOU AGAIN.” She rang the bell.
“You showed up.”
Becky had put on about thirty pounds since Kat had last seen her, and she wasn’t wearing anything Kat would take the garbage out in, but she looked good. Hair was combed, shiny. Eyes clear, skin unblemished. Skintight jeans were clean and in good shape. Black cotton-poly top with three-quarter sleeves and floral embroidery fringing the (modestly) plunging neckline. A pair of rainbow-striped toe socks. Probably she’d dressed for her. Kat imagined that this was the picky way that the social workers who’d always popped in and out of Nebising had taken things in. She smiled and raised her arms for a hug, refraining from an assessment of the living room.
“Of course I did.”
“I knew I’d figure out a way to get you down here.”
“I would’ve come anyway.”
“Bullshit,” said Becky. “But no matter. You want coffee?” She headed for the kitchen without waiting for an answer and Kat took off her coat and hung it on one of the hooks mounted on the wall behind the door. She followed Becky to the kitchen, waiting at the breakfast bar that divided it from the living room while Becky filled two mugs. She put Kat’s in front of her and got out a box of sugar and a carton of whole milk. Kat ignored the sugar and poured milk into her coffee.
She asked, “Do you have a spoon?”
“You bet.” Becky opened the dishwasher and pulled out a spoon, then washed it by hand in the sink. She dried the spoon on a dishtowel and carried it over, dropping it directly into Kat’s mug.
“Where’s Brandon?” asked Kat.
“Out and about,” said Becky. “Don’t ask me. All into his own shit, that one.”
“I wish I’d had a chance to see him.”
“You never know. Comes and goes like this was a hotel. Just like my mom used to say about me, ennit?”
“Yep.”
“So you got some pictures to show me?”
“Right here.” Kat patted her bag.
“Let’s sit,” said Becky. Carrying her coffee, she came around the bar and crossed the carpet. She walked with the busy, measured tread heavy people sometimes had, and, like a train, sighed whenever she started or stopped. She set her mug on top of a large TV set and then dragged an ottoman from its place before a plump easy chair and positioned it in front of a big brown couch. She balanced the mug on the surface of the ottoman and then sat on the couch under a gigantic old mirror in a tarnished and chipped gilt frame. Kat remembered it. The three panels were divided by miniature Corinthian columns, and the large center panel was still missing its glass. Some stenciled numbers and the words GRAND RAPIDS, MICH were visible on the masonite backing that showed through the empty frame. Kat sat next to her and began feeling in her bag for her phone.
“What’s that on your sleeve?”
Kat looked down and saw the crusted blob of Alexander’s semen. “From lunch, I guess.”
“Looks like jism.”
Kat laughed and scraped it off with a fingernail. “No such luck!”
“I should hope not.” Becky laughed too. “Come on, get this over with so we can do some serious catching up.”
Kat fixed a smile on her face and pulled up the photos on her phone, then passed it to Becky. She leaned over. “Here’s how you—”
“That’s him all right,” she said, passing the phone back.
“You’re sure?”
“Does the pope shit in the woods?”
“That’s a question for medical science.” Kat put the phone away, glancing at the time. It would be easy to just go, wouldn’t it. But she didn’t.
“You want a real drink?” Becky asked. “It’s after five, come on.”
“These roads,” Kat said.
“Never used to bother you,” said Becky, getting up. She trudged to the kitchen and ostentatiously poured out her coffee, holding the cup at a height above the sink.
“A lot of things used to not bother me,” said Kat.
“You weren’t even here for all the funerals, neither,” said Becky, bringing a glass and a half-full bottle of Smirnoff with her to the couch. “There was this, like, epidemic of crashes right after high school. Tommy Soulier. Greg Delabreau.”
“I remember.”
“Aaron Williams and Amy Kequom.”
“I remember.”
“Well, you didn’t show.” Becky poured two inches of vodka into the glass, then placed the bottle carefully on the floor.
“Nebising doesn’t control world rights,” said Kat, irritably.
“To what?”
“Me. For one thing. Death. Heartache. For a couple others.”
“Home always got some claim on you.”
“Not me.”
Becky patted her hand. “Take it easy, honey. No one’s going to handcuff you to the furnace just because you’re here.”
“Give me a damn drink.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“I don’t know why you always have to give me a hard time.”
“You’re like Mount Everest.”
“Just there.”
“When you are. I got shit to give you I’ve been storing up for years.”
“Can’t wait,” said Kat. She realized that she was expected to get her own glass and went into the kitchen for it, looking in three annoyingly well-stocked cabinets before she found the glassware.
AN HOUR LATER she was drunk and barefoot. The vodka was nearly gone, but she had a feeling that Becky wasn’t the sort of person to run out of booze.
“Want to ask you something,” said Becky. Kat raised her chin to receive the question, as if it were a fast pitch. “When’s the last time you rode in an elevator?”
“Uh, I don’t know. Monday?”
Becky held up three fingers of her right hand. “Three years,” she said.
“I never thought about it,” said Kat.
“Let me ask you. If you ride an elevator every day, do you ever stop doing that thing?”
“What thing?
“The thing where you look up or down or anywhere but at the other people.”
Kat rummaged deeply in this unexpected area of expertise. “No. I don’t think you ever do. You talk to someone’s baby, maybe. Or if they bring a cute dog on you might talk to the dog, ask the dog questions, which the owner answers.”
“I don’t know why that seems so sad.”
“It shouldn’t. They’re just strangers in a box. I’d rather talk to the dog most of the time anyways.”
“You’re like your grampa. He sure didn’t like talking much, either.”
“I like talking just fine. But ‘Cold out there’? ‘Have a good weekend’? That’s not talking.”
“But he didn’t.”
“The people who really like to talk, anyways, are the crazy ones. They come up to you, with these historical complaints, like they filed the papers and you’re supposed to be all up on it.”
“You came back for his funeral, though, didn’t you?”
“It’s not God stuff, either. I always thought it was God stuff they talked about, but it mostly sounds like trash TV, like they’re pretending they’re guests on Ricki Lake.” Kat emptied her glass. “I had to come back for his funeral. He wouldn’t’ve had one if I didn’t.”
“He missed you.”
“Oh, please. Happiest day in his life was when I left for Ann Arbor. He never bargained for me. He never bargained for anything he got.”
“Nobody ever does.”
“I did.”
“So what’s the best thing about living in Chicago?”
“I can tell you the worst thing.”
“What already?”
“Too many places painted in primary colors. Whole parts of the city look like they were designed by Swedes for children.”
“Not something you hear a lot.”
“It’s a secret,” slurred Kat.
“What do you mean you did?”
It took Kat a moment to realize what Becky was referring to. “I mean none of this was an accident. I mean, there were accidents, why Chicago and why not New York, I would prefer Paris I think but then I’ve never been there, et cetera. I live where I live because we lost a bid on a place in Old Town; that was an accident. You couldn’t tell the difference between Old Town and where I ended up in Lincoln Park, but I cried.”
“Sucks to be you.”
“I know, I know, I’m telling you because it’s so idiotic. But the overall design of it, I mean, being there and not here, is the thing. That was me.”
“Turning your back, never returning calls, that was you.”
“Becky. There were like two people here. And I didn’t turn my back. I wanted out.”
“And all the people in Chicago, they know you’re an Indian.”
“Some do. Some don’t.”
“So when they ask.”
“Nobody asks. They ask did you like your real estate agent. That’s a personal question.”
“You say no, I’m guessing.”
Kat mimed crying, holding her fists up to her cheekbones and twisting them, and they both laughed.
“So you don’t lie ever,” said Becky.
“I never lie.”
All of this was delivered in a playful joshing tone that denied the seriousness of the conversation and the anger they both felt. Kat could feel it in her stomach, and in the roar of the blood in her ears. She could feel her discomfort in the way that she couldn’t look Becky in the eye when she answered her. It was always best to deal with old friends at a great distance, she thought. The standard diplomatic communiqués on the usual occasions. These freestyle conversations ranged into too much dangerous territory and couldn’t possibly be of any use. It occurred to her all at once that it meant a lot to Becky, this idea that she had something on her. It wasn’t moral outrage, but the hostile glee of a potential blackmailer. She got up, too quickly. She felt fuzzy, and suddenly sick to her stomach. Becky said “Uh oh” and pointed toward the hall and Kat headed to the bathroom there, closing the door behind her, turning on the water in the sink, and lifting the lid of the toilet without breaking stride. She leaned over and vomited quietly into the bowl in the soft glow of a night-light; rested there with her hands on the cool rim, panting. Nothing more was coming. She cleaned up and squeezed some toothpaste onto her finger and swabbed out the inside of her mouth.
When she came back into the living room she saw that Brandon had returned home. Squat little boy, with glasses. He said hello at Becky’s urging and then ignored her. Becky was already moving around the kitchen, pulling boxes of dinner out of the cabinets, putting water on to boil. Kat sat on the couch and pulled her boots on. It would be smooth sailing now. You’re not leaving already, I’ve already stayed too long, I don’t want to interrupt your evening, and so forth. They hugged at the door, and Becky came out on the porch to watch as she got into her rental and backed out of the driveway. She even waved.
Fifteen miles later Kat felt sober enough to roll up the window and turn on the heat. She sailed north, back to another shitty place where she didn’t want to be.
23
THE f
irst affair began at a party that the TV critic from the Reader had thrown at his apartment in West Town. It was hot and she’d gone up to the roof with a guy who blogged on the media for the Oxford American, David, and they’d talked about The Wire. She gave him a blow job and he kept losing his hard-on. They saw each other four times, at his apartment. It turned out he liked to snuggle and eat ice cream, period. She stopped answering his calls.
The next guy had come up to her while she was standing at the bar waiting to order drinks for herself and Justin, who was waiting at a table in the back. She was stretching to reach an itchy patch of skin on her right shoulder blade when Michael came up beside her and asked her if she had an itch she couldn’t scratch. He made it sound slyer than it was corny and before carrying her drinks back to the table she’d accepted his discreetly proffered card and the next day sent him an e-mail. He skipped the preliminaries and simply invited her to his place, where he plied her with marijuana and then aggressively fucked her in the two orifices she allowed him access to. This began to happen once, sometimes twice a week and fell apart only when his refusal to wear a condom made regular AIDS tests such a nerve-wracking part of her life that she had to break it off.
The third affair was with Will, who was a principal in an extremely well-capitalized Internet company but who “really” wrote poetry, mostly in notebooks that depicted Japanese anime characters on their covers, and who lived in a cavernous apartment on Lake Shore Drive exactly two rooms of which were furnished, via IKEA, but which had—Kat will never forget—a library with built-in mahogany bookcases that was elaborately painted with trompe l’oeil columns and entablature pompously inscribed with the names of great writers and thinkers of antiquity. He was more affectionate than Michael, and he liked to fuck more than the media critic had. He began to get complicated after the third time they saw each other, though, and not in an interesting way. She had to change her phone number, which was tricky to explain.
The fourth affair was with Steve, who delivered FedEx direct to the newsroom. He was a prematurely gray, delicately featured guy who was in excellent shape and fucked her every Thursday either in the back of his truck which, by arrangement with the security guards, he parked in the elaborate porte cochere of the building across the street, or in the fire stairs, where people rarely ventured once the Mirror had made it a policy to fire on the spot anyone discovered smoking there. She liked Steve; he showed her pictures of his kids and seemed genuinely to like his wife. He never complained about anything, not even work, and was silent during sex except when he came, when he invariably said, “Oh fuck, yeah, fuck, that’s how I like it.” She was not the only customer he had sex with. Evidently he was a “sex addict,” or so she gathered, having read a piece on the subject (“Sex Addiction: Are You or Someone You Love a Victim?” [sic]) in the Mirror’s Health & Science pages, though his addiction didn’t seem to interfere with anything. (Of course, she hadn’t checked on that with Mrs. Steve or the kids.) They stopped when he was transferred to a different route.